


i am out with lanterns looking for myself

by pyotr



Category: American Civil War RPF, Historical RPF, The CiviliTy of Albert Cashier - Stevens & Wooden/Deratany
Genre: Gen, M/M, Slow Burn, ghost au, graphic violence tag & major character death tag are both because of ghosts, probably lol, sort of modern au also i suppose
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-07-24 22:49:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16184804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyotr/pseuds/pyotr
Summary: Albert reaches up as if to wipe it away but only succeeds in leaving an ugly red smear across Jeff’s dirty cheek, watching helplessly as he sucked in a last, struggling breath, and his expression stilled in death, still twisted into some rictus of terror.And then he wakes up, sitting straight up in his bed and breathing hard.There is still blood on his hand, blood not his own.





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first attempt at a multi-chaptered fic :)

He closes his eyes and he is standing in a grassy field.

  
He is standing in a grassy field, and there are lead balls flying past his head, canon shot tearing up the dirt a few hundred yards away. Albert throws himself to the ground and behind him, Atlanta burns; men all around him are shouting, in pain or in fear or in fury. He covers his ears and squeezes his eyes shut.

  
See, the thing was that Albert had been having dreams like this for a few months. They had started two or three years ago: he’d fall asleep and then he’d be somewhere else, sometimes someone else or just a stranger looking in. They often felt so real that they were more than just dreams; he’d followed this boy- this _man_ \- for years.

And it seemed, now, that he’d come to the end.

  
The man (Jeff, his name was Jeff, Albert had listened to his family talk with him, laugh with him, love him) lies a few feet away, his face twisted with pain, jacket buttons ripped off to show the blood turning his dirty shirt red. There was blood on his face, too, painting his lips and his chin dark and grisly. Albert drags himself across the ground, takes Jeff’s hand in his own. He felt like he owed him this comfort, if only because he’d seen so much of his life to not care here at the end.

  
“Take it easy,” he says, and his voice only cracks a little, feeling that sick, trembling feeling start low in his stomach. “It’s alright, soon it won’t hurt.”

  
Jeff’s head rolls to face him, strange and limp, his green eyes wide and wild. In that moment he looked more animal than man but Albert swears that Jeff’s hand tightened around his own, that their eyes met. Something like surprise flashed over Jeff’s face, or recognition, or _something_ , and he gurgles and then coughs like he had tried to speak, blood bubbling over his lips.

  
Albert reaches up as if to wipe it away but only succeeds in leaving an ugly red smear across Jeff’s dirty cheek, watching helplessly as he sucked in a last, struggling breath, and his expression stilled in death, still twisted into some rictus of terror.

  
And then he wakes up, sitting straight up in his bed and breathing hard.

  
There is still blood on his hand, blood not his own.


	2. chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> exposition heavy, sorry

See, the thing about Albert was that he didn’t think of himself as something special.

He’d been able to see ghosts since for as long as he could remember, and so it had never seemed strange to him. And they were mostly mundane interactions: he’d feel a chilly breeze and look up and see a stranger in the crowd, someone that just didn’t belong, that no one else seemed to notice. Often the ghosts seemed just as nonplussed, or confused, living people passing through them like they were air.

As a child he had told his mother, tugging on her hand to excitedly point out something that she couldn’t see. She would brush him off tiredly- she had always been tired, then, and never really had the time for him- and tell him that it was just his imagination, that he shouldn’t bother her with silly stories. He had quieted, then, and swallowed the disappointment, and stopped trying to tell people about the ghosts.

Albert had learned a long time ago to pretend that he couldn’t see them, either.

It didn’t matter as much anymore, he supposed. He hadn’t seen a ghost in years.

“Al?” Walter asks from the other end of the couch, and when Albert glances over he seems worried. There are bags under his eyes, his clothes rumpled, exhausted and worn in the way he always was around midterms and finals; there were flashcards in his hands, his laptop open on the coffee table to some mysterious paper full of medical jargon that Albert couldn’t possibly parse. “Are you okay?”

Albert rubs his hands across his face and nods, knuckling at his eyes. “Yeah, just tired,” he says, and he tries to sound reassuring. “I just had a late shift and some bad dreams last night, is all.”

He didn’t want to talk about it. He’d told Walter about his dreams before, strange recurring dreams that all centered around the same person who lived a hundred years ago that he never met, and Walter had just looked at him for a long moment and then gently recommended a counselor. Stress manifestations, he had said, and he had been kind about it. Go get help.

What was Albert supposed to say? That he saw the boy in his dreams again, and held his hand as he died?

“I’m fine,” he says, more convincing this time.

Walter eyes him for a moment longer, considering, gauging his sincerity before he shrugs and says, “If you’re sure.”

Xxxxx

The thing was, Albert  _wasn’t_ sure.

He didn’t dream of Jeff again that night, or the night after that, or even the night after  _that._ In and of itself this wasn’t so strange- he’d been dreaming of him for two or three years and had gone weeks between visits- but it made his skin itch. For some strange, unfathomable reason, he hated that the last time he had seen the man had been in such ugly circumstances. Jeff deserved better than that, even if he was just a figment of Albert’s own mind.

“C’mon, you bastard,” he mumbles into his pillow one night, the dark feeling almost suffocating, “don’t leave me hanging like that.”

But there were no dreams for him that night, either.

It was strange, the sense of loneliness that it left him with- the sense of loss. It was grief, in its own way, for a boy he had never met and who had never existed at all. He hates it, this disappointment that he feels down to his bones, but he hates the way that Walter seems to dance around him even more- how he treated him more kindly, how he watched him from the corner of his eye as if he expected him to break down any minute- so Albert sucks it up, and he moves on.

He doesn’t mean to start measuring time by that standard, by how long it had been since he had held Jeff’s hand in his dream and watched him die, but it happens anyway.

But Albert had a life outside of those dreams; he didn’t revolve around them. He had his classes, and his friends, and his job. He studied or watched bad television with Walter and Billy, some nights, or he went out and just walked. At work he mixed drinks and flirted with pretty strangers in the dim club for tips, flashing a smile here, brushing fingers there.

He threw himself into work, into school. He takes late shifts and pushes himself into every extra credit assignment. He still feels haunted.

It is late when he comes home from work that night, or early, depending on the hour. An early fall chill was beginning to settle over the city, pushing away the punishing heat of summer in Georgia, but the apartment was cooler than when he had left it. Albert frowns and shoves his hands int his pockets, shuffling over to the thermostat; perhaps Walter had turned it down, though there was no reason for him to. They had a strict house rule on temperature.

The thermostat read seventy-two degrees, the numbers glowing faintly in the dark of the apartment.

Albert grumbles to himself and toes off his shoes, nudging them against the wall before he starts off toward his room with socked feet, creeping as quietly as he could. Walter would be asleep or studying, and either way wouldn’t appreciate an interruption; Albert had learned that the hard way. His own room is at the end of the hall and the door creaks only a little bit, the latch clicking quietly as he closes it behind him and gropes along the wall for the light switch.

He muffles a yawn with the back of his hand as he shrugs out of his jacket and is halfway through pulling off his shirt when someone behind him clears their throat.

Albert pauses, freezes for a moment, and then turns fast enough on his heel to give himself whiplash. But there, sitting on bed looking vaguely sheepish, was a young man dressed in outdated clothing with dirt and blood smeared across his face, a heavy-looking sack and rifle set at his feet.

It was Jeffrey. Of course.

“What the  _fuck?”_


	3. chapter 2

_“You,”_ Albert manages, and somehow there’s some type of menace in his tone, some type of anger.

“You!” the ghost yelps at the same time, leaping to his feet, his expression open with surprise.

And Albert  _was_ angry, he found, because for some reason he had been grieving this boy that he didn’t even know, that he didn’t even think was  _real,_ and here was, having the gall to wait on his bed in the dark at three in the morning. And he wanted to know why, why now of all times, after months of silence.

“What are you doing here?” he demands.

“Where’s  _here?”_  Jeff answers. “Who’re you?”

He looks confused and lost, and still bloodied, his eyes big in his thin face, and Albert softens a little. Perhaps Jeff, ghost as he was, didn’t know what was happening any more than Albert did. They were about he same age, he thinks, though Jeff was so expressive and so gangly that Albert sometimes felt that he was years younger. He looks it now, like a scared child, his shoulders rounded inward and a nervous look on his face.

“My apartment,” Albert says. “I’m Al.”

“Al,” Jeff repeats, as if rolling the name around on his tongue. “I’m Jeff. Jeffrey. Al short for anything?”

“Albert,” he says, and then, “I watched you die.”

There’s a long pause after that and Jeff looks away, sinking back down to sit on the bed and picking instead at the threadbare knee of his trousers. Albert watches him, takes in all the details. He looked solid enough,  _real_ enough, but ghosts had always looked that way to him. He could tell by the cold that seemed to radiate from him, from the way that he didn’t seem to truly touch things but instead over a few centimeters above them.

“I know,” Jeff says, quiet, and he glances up something twisted and uncomfortable in his expression. “I saw you, just before… Well. Y’know. I died.”

His voice cracks on the last word, sounding like it stuck in his throat.

“Yeah,” Albert says, just as quiet. He rubs his arms, chilled, but comes to sit next to Jeff on the bed anyway. Nearness was comfort of a sort. “Why are you here?”

“I dunno.” Jeff sniffles, rubs his sleeve across his nose like he was about to cry and trying to hide it. “I was just sorta… floatin’, you know? And I thought about my family. About my sisters, mostly, and how I never came home. I promised Charlie I would when I left for the courthouse that mornin’. Well, I was thinkin’ of them, of what could’ve happened to them, when things started gettin’ clearer and sharper, and then I was here, I think, in the dark.”

Albert lets that sit a minute, parses his way through all the babbled and fast, run-together words.

“Why didn’t you turn on the light?”

And Jeff snorts at that, scratching at his cheek, reminding Albert of just how filthy he was. There was nothing to be done for it really, except hope that he didn’t get the blankets dirty also. “Your lamps’re different. Not oil, no candles. Also, I don’t think I can touch stuff here.”

“You’re sitting on my bed,” Albert points out, dry.

“Yeah, but I’ve gotta think real hard about it.”

He hums in response, leaning back on his hands. There were goosebumps on his arms from the cold that Jeff gave off.

“So you were thinking about your family, and then you were here,” he says, as if for clarification.

“Yep,” Jeff agrees.

“You’ve been dead a hundred and fifty years,” Albert points out, “and I’m just a college student. I can’t help you with anything.”

“That long, huh?” Jeff says it as though he doesn’t mean for Albert to overhear, breathing in something like awe and disappointment. And then, “Well, you can try. I just wanna know what happened to them. To my family.”

“Jeffrey,” Albert says slowly, “Do you know where you are?”

A frown steals across his face, creasing his brow. “I didn’t think ‘bout that.”

“We’re in Atlanta,” Albert tells him. “Georgia. This is where you died. I don’t know where I’d even start to look for your family. I don’t even know your last name.”

“It’s Davis,” Jeff answers immediately. “Jeffrey N. Davis, that’s me. My family’s from Illinois, up ‘round Belvidere and Rockford, thereabouts.”

Albert makes an exasperated sound but Jeff watches him earnestly, something so eager and hopeful in his eyes that any protest Albert may have given shrivels and dies on his tongue. Instead, Albert heaves a sigh and flops backwards on the bed closing his eyes.

“I can’t make any promises,” he says, “but if I try, will you leave me alone?”

There’s no answer but suddenly there’s a rush of heat, leaving Albert’s skin tingling at the sudden change in temperature, and when he opens his eyes Jeff is gone.

He takes that as a yes.

* * *

 

“Did you have someone over last night?” Walter asks when Albert shuffles out of his room around noon, a smile lurking about his lips that he hides behind his mug of coffee.

“No.” Albert yawns, scratching at his stomach. He’d gotten home late, and then had been unable to fall asleep, replaying the whole strange interaction with Jeff over and over and over. He still wasn’t sure what he was going to do about it. “Why?”

“You were talking to someone.” Walter eyes him closely, looking him up and down, taking in the rumpled hair and the bags under his eyes. He softens suddenly, his expression melting from impish to compassionate. “Was it your mom?”

Albert doesn’t quite wince and shakes his head.

“Not even close,” he sighs, settling himself on the couch next to Walter and reaching for his coffee. Walter rolls his eyes and hands it over, and Albert makes a grateful noise as he lifts it to his mouth.

“A friend, then,” Walter compromises, watching him with raised eyebrows, and then looks away when Albert levels him with a glare. “Fine,” he says indulgently, “I’ll quit. But I’ll find out, Albert.”


	4. chapter 3

As it happened, Albert wasn’t entirely sure where to start helping Jeff.

He spends a few days just using search engines, typing in  _Jeff Davis,_ and then  _Jeffrey Davis, Jeffrey Davis Civil War, Jeffrey Davis Belvidere,_ and half-heartedly combing through the first three pages of results for each search. But Albert had never been a good researcher- had never had the patience or the passion for it- and so he quickly burned out of ideas.

He wastes a few more days dithering around the idea of going to a library, of finding some archive to bury himself in, if only to feel useful.

He didn’t, though. He  _did_ have other things to do.

Albert felt almost guilty about it. He had promised Jeff that he would help him, help to find out what happened to his family, but he really was next to useless. He hems and haws over that, worries about it to the point that it stacked up on his classes and his work and left Walter watching him with a keen eye.

“You smell like alcohol,” says Jeff’s accusing voice behind him.

Albert sighs, rubs at the hair standing up on the back of his neck, and doesn’t turn to look. He sits in the library brightly-lit with white light, almost empty at this time of night. He was studying for a class- he had long forgotten which one, almost cross-eyed from exhaustion- and he was sure he looked a fright, but at least there was no one around to see him

No one alive, anyway.

“You can smell?” he asks idly.

Jeff scoffs and Albert can hear him move, the rustle of his clothing and the quiet clatter of his canteen against his haversack. He glances up when the toes of Jeff’s worn, dirty boots stop just on the edge of his vision, a stark contrast to the library’s waxed tile floor.

“I can smell,” Jeff says, and there’s a frown on his face, as if he were disappointed, “and you smell like alcohol. Thought you were s’posed to be helpin’ me, not havin’ a bit’ve a drink.”

“I work at a bar. Everything smells like alcohol.” Albert rolls his eyes; why should he have to explain himself to a man that’s been dead for a century and a half? “Did you know that you have a really common last name?”

Something twitches about Jeff’s mouth as he settles in the chair on the other side of the table, one left pulled out by its previous occupant, and he shucks off his rifle and his haversack before he really looks at Albert, and once again Albert is struck by just how horrifically  _young_ Jeff was, twenty-something forever.

He tries to think of what it was like, separated from everyone and everything you knew, moving through a world you couldn’t even interact with. He feels sick.

“Jeffrey,” Albert asks suddenly, and he doesn’t know if he’s ever actually used the ghost’s name before now. He pauses for a moment, rolling it around on his tongue. “Jeffrey, how old were you?”

“Huh?”

“When you died,” Albert says, “how old were you?”

“Well,” Jeff says, considering, leaning back in his chair. The wood doesn’t creak like it should have, had someone with a flesh and bone body been sitting in it. “I was born in 1842. I turned twenty-two in May of ’65. So I would’ve been thereabouts.”

And suddenly, all at once, Albert pities him terribly.

“Tell me about your family,” he says, changing tracks entirely, only in part to try to escape that sad, sinking feeling.

He really did want to know about Jeff’s family, know who they were outside of the people he had seen in dreams.

Jeff manages a smile, then, but it’s not like any smile he’s favored Albert with; it’s soft and warm, affectionate, a faint flash of teeth. “I’m the oldest’ve five,” he says, sounding almost bashful. “Well, six. There’s me, then there was Laurie- he died young, though, was a few years after me- and Charlie, Annie, Fanny, and Nate. My parents, too.”

He seemed happy, talking about them, and something in Albert’s gut tightens with mingled sympathy and jealousy. A happy home life, a family that loved him- these were things that Albert didn’t have. He’d never thought much about it, had never  _let_ himself think much about it; he’d gone home with Walter on holidays and had contented himself with that.

He says, “What were they like?”

“Oh, they’re a handful, every one’ve ‘em.” Jeff laughs a little here, indulgent, and he scratches vaguely at his cheek as he thinks. “Charlie was as bold as you please; she had her own way’ve things and she’d do what she liked no matter what our ma said. Annie was quieter, shy, but sweet as sugar; she liked her books, more’n anything. Fanny was the youngest girl, loud and bright and cheerful. Nate was barely more’n a babe in arms when I enlisted, he was so young.”

He pauses here, then repeats quietly, “They were all so young.”

Albert reaches across the table the lay his hand on Jeff’s arm in some effort at comfort, but his hand passes straight through with little more than a nip of cold. Jeff smiles at him, smaller and more tumultuous than before, but genuine regardless.

He didn’t know how to mourn people. He’d never had anyone  _to_ mourn; all of his losses had been his own choice. He wasn’t sad that Jeff was dead because he’d never known him when he was alive, not really, but Jeff’s grief was open and painful as a wound. He’d had a whole family that he’d left behind, a life of love that he’d promised to come back to,and then he just… hadn’t. Albert wasn’t even sure if his family ever learned what had happened to him, dying alone on that field, choking on his own blood.

“I’m sorry,” Albert says, and it feels like too little. And then, “You were young, too.”


End file.
